Such were the principles underlying the house design of professed masters in architecture in the first half of the eighteenth century, and it was by publishing their designs that they commended themselves to the public. They had travelled far from the virility of Inigo Jones and the splendid common-sense of Wren. Not that Wren had left much of a legacy in house design. He was an architect of the first rank, but his work had been chiefly concerned with St Paul’s Cathedral in London, with the city churches, with palaces and public buildings. There are but few houses among his preserved drawings, and what there are throw little illumination on the subject; he never pursued it so as to make it his own. A few houses here and there are attributed to him, but it has always been the fashion to attribute unknown work of exceptional merit to some master of the period on little or no sound authority. But although he left no direct legacy, a man of such wealth in architectural power could hardly die and leave nothing behind him; and doubtless to his influence may be traced much of the spirit which characterises the vernacular work of the eighteenth century. CHAPTER XIII. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EXTERIORS--THE PALLADIAN STYLE. Architectural design having become an elegant occupation founded on so impracticable a basis, it is not surprising to find it pursued by amateurs. Lord Burlington was the most eminent of these, and he tried his hand, according to contemporary accounts, at a number of houses as well as at some semi-public buildings, such as the Assembly Room at York. Kent includes several in his book on Inigo Jones, where they suffer somewhat by comparison with the genuine work of the master. The well-known house in Burlington Street for General Wade was another of his creations, of which Walpole recounts that being ill-contrived and inconvenient, yet having a beautiful front, Lord Chesterfield said that as the General could not live in it to his ease, he had better take a house over against it and look at it. The villa at Chiswick was yet another of his designs, borrowed, as Walpole says, from a villa of Palladio’s. Though faulty in plan and arrangement, as that chronicler admits, yet these blemishes could not “depreciate the taste that reigns in the whole.” He then adds an observation which throws much light on the motives that underlay the architectural design of the time. “The larger court,” he says, “dignified by picturesque cedars, and the classic scenery of the small court that unites the old and the new house, are more worth seeing than many fragments of ancient grandeur, which our travellers visit under all the dangers attendant on long voyages.” It would seem that to have a bit of architectural grouping that really reminded you of Italy more than compensated for damp, draughty, and inconvenient rooms.